The Red Queen Hypothesis
The Red Queen Hypothesis. Lately, JL seemed off. Well, he’d always been a little strange, but recently it had gotten worse. The change started right around the time we ran into his old comrade at the orbital elevator.
The frequency of his nightmares had spiked. When I slept pressed against him on the sofa, I could feel the unease bleeding into me too. By the time his eyes snapped open, his entire body was usually slick with cold sweat. Just a bad dream, or maybe he simply had no resistance left to the past. If you’d spent years burying it only for it to claw its way back up, that kind of reaction made sense.
I considered offering him some advice, then thought better of it. The only thing I could tell him was to empty his head and accept it, but I wasn’t even sure that counted as proper advice. Everyone who’d ever taken my counsel in the past had ended up clutching the back of their neck and shaking their head, so the odds that I was helpful were slim. Better to let JL handle his own nightmares.
On the other hand, I was clashing with Eileen over the Rish situation. I had zero desire to tangle with Ares again, and even less interest in turning the drugs into a hostage play.
“Just look at the size of the corporations involved. It’s not on a scale we can handle. One wrong move and we won’t be collecting money—we’ll be collecting bullet holes.”
But Eileen dismantled my argument with something far more logical.
“Does money fall from the sky? We have to account for sunk costs per job and the possibility that things go sideways. Sure, your only life goal might be riding an adrenaline high, but you still need to be alive to enjoy it, don’t you?”
“Ugh…”
I mulled it over and let out a low groan. It was such a reasonable point that I had no rebuttal. Of course, her claim that I lived solely for fighting was a bit off the mark, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either. Besides, Eileen was the one actually managing the finances for our equipment and requests. When the person holding the purse strings spoke, it carried weight. Who could argue with the one in charge of the money?
At least I, who barely thought about that stuff, couldn’t. In the end I just shrugged and told her to do whatever she wanted. Getting mixed up with Ares was ultimately a matter of luck. If things went well, we might be able to wrap it up at the Violet Science or Rose Group level. It wasn’t something I had to reject outright.
It’s no different from a kid throwing a tantrum.
If you’re an adult, act like one. Sometimes you have to know when to compromise.
……
But the word left a foul taste in my mouth. I caught myself frowning before I realized it. It was just the single word “compromise,” yet it suddenly felt unbearable. Maybe I should have stuck to my guns after all.
No.
Even calling it stubbornness was new; I hadn’t been that way for long. I wasn’t originally a stubborn person, so I had no skill at forcing my will through. Compromise, on the other hand, was something I’d done constantly during my Hound days. Now that I’d grown to despise that period of my life, it was only natural to feel revulsion toward the habits that came with it.
Still, it stung a little. A small spark of rebellion flared up. I grumbled under my breath and gave the bag full of drugs a sharp kick.
KWAANG!
A massive explosion tore through the air. The deafening blast shook the entire building. Even JL, who had been dead asleep, screamed and shot upright. I snatched up my weapons while Eileen slapped JL’s cheeks to snap him out of his panic. After a few solid smacks he regained his senses.
While the two of them braced for whatever came next, I focused my hearing and assessed the situation. The explosion had come from the floor below—the first-floor garage with its attached warehouse. No sounds of collapse, so the structural damage couldn’t be too severe, but the shockwave still echoed in the walls.
I waited for the roar to fade, then activated the auditory enhancement implant in my ear. The voices of the people attacking us came through clearly.
Two… no, more than that.
They weren’t really talking. It was more like shrieking, cackling laughter. I couldn’t tell if it was some kind of tactic. Their movements had no pattern, no coordination. Whatever they were, they clearly weren’t corporate troops.
As I tried to pin down their identity, the sound of scraping metal came from outside again. Then a gatling gun began chewing into the building’s outer wall. Eileen and JL crouched low, ready for anything. I bent at the waist and sprinted toward the window overlooking the street.
No sign of them breaching the building yet. In that case, the sensible thing was to greet them first. The fundamentals of combat are preemptive strikes. Of course they’d already taken the first shot, but when the target is people instead of a building, the math changes.
I checked the battle rifle and shotgun linked to my arm’s adapter, then grabbed the weapon that had fallen conveniently nearby.
“Asa, what are you doing?”
“They showed us some courtesy. Only polite to return the favor.”
I answered Eileen’s voice behind me while hefting the anti-tank rocket launcher that filled my arms. The satisfying weight brought a faint smile to my lips.
“JL, cover me.”
Eileen gave up and asked JL for help. He quickly moved to my side. A moment later the gatling gun fell silent. Listening to the spinning barrels wind down, I signaled JL where he crouched beneath the windowsill, then stood and flung the window open.
“Kuh!”
The anti-tank round roared out. Down on the street sat an armored vehicle with a roof hatch cut open to mount the gatling gun. The thugs clustered around it swung their weapons toward me the instant I appeared. Muzzles flashed almost simultaneously.
For a split second the rocket and a storm of bullets crossed paths.
KABOOM!
The armored vehicle instantly became a burning hunk of scrap metal and launched into the air. It bounced like it had hit a trampoline before slamming back to the ground. The shockwave hurled the surrounding enemies in every direction.
I seized the chaos and leapt from the windowsill. Giving them time to regroup would only put us at a disadvantage. I dropped prone and quickly finished off the two who were still dazed. By the time I was done, the rest had recovered and risen. The fight dissolved into a chaotic melee.
The moment I tried to put a shotgun slug through one man’s skull, a monomolecular katana slipped in from my blind spot and grazed my arm. The thug barely survived thanks to that. I twisted away from the follow-up strike. My shotgun, Fang, had been damaged by the blade and was now useless. I discarded it and leveled the battle rifle at the idiot still swinging a melee weapon right in front of my muzzle.
It should have been an easy kill, but something felt off. The moment I aimed, the blade threatened to shear off my forearm. A constant tightrope walk where one mistake would cost me an arm. I kept trying to create distance, but my current body made it hard to win in mobility.
Then I figured it out. The instant the blade came swinging, I charged straight at him.
Bang.
I slid between his legs and fired upward into the back he’d foolishly turned toward me. He’d been tougher than expected. When I scanned the area, I saw that JL’s covering fire from the window had dropped about half of them. At the same time, two more were rushing me.
I snatched up a monomolecular katana from one of the fallen. It was heavier than it looked—not an unpleasant weight. I’d thought swinging a melee weapon in front of a gun was stupid, but it wasn’t half bad in practice.
One of the thugs saw me pick up the blade and sneered openly. I charged him immediately, bent my body to slip past the gun muzzle, and drove the blade through him like a skewer. Even with my limited strength the monomolecular edge slid through flesh and sliced cleanly through his abdominal reinforcement implant.
The man behind him saw his comrade impaled and opened fire wildly—straight through his own ally. At me, to be precise. The thug I’d skewered was shredded by his friend’s bullets and died on the spot. I slipped out from under the falling body and put the battle rifle on the shooter. He was still firing at his own man, completely unaware of the situation. In the end he never even saw my face before he died.
The frenzied battle continued until, at some point, the area fell quiet. The work of both JL and me. All that remained on the street was the crackling of the armored vehicle burning like a bonfire.
I looked at Eileen, who had poked her head out the window, and said with a satisfied smirk.
“See? I told you we might end up with our bodies turned into beehives.”
Eileen let out a small laugh. A moment later she came down to the street and examined the fallen thugs.
“It’s a gang.”
“A gang?”
“One that operates pretty far from here. Not worth remembering the name… Nothing ring any bells?”
I thought back to my time working with Darius. How many gangs had we crushed together? But I doubted this was retaliation for any of that. If it were, it would have come much sooner. Not that I would have taken it quietly. Besides, the tattoo Eileen pointed out as proof was a symbol I’d never seen before. She said their structure was cellular, but none of my memories matched. In the end there was only one likely answer.
“They were after Rish.”
“Ugh…”
“I told you it was dangerous.”
Eileen simply laughed at my words.